Motivation dressed up as fun

The words "team-building event" can send even the most confident professional deep into despondency. However good the initiator's intentions, devoting a chunk of precious spare time to fun-based motivational activities with your colleagues simply isn't everyone's game of paintball.

For many motivation sceptics, the chief concern is not so much the events but their tendency to take place in mud and water and require lots of pushing, pulling, lifting and running.

When you've chosen a career that lets you spend your days in a warm office handy for nice restaurants, doing your back in on a moor in the rain doesn't necessarily improve your team spirit. But just because you're not the outdoor type doesn't mean the uplifting world of team-building and motivational events is closed to you.

A wide and growing range of indoor events is on offer for the team that's feeling a little crumbly, particularly at this time of year, when the whizz-splat of paint capsules is quieter and the quad bikes stay in the garage. The options are broad, with events companies constantly trying to out-whacky the competition and tempt managers anxious about the morale or drive of their charges.

You can opt for something nice and simple, such as a themed evening, where everyone dresses in the style of a particular culture, historical period or classic TV series, and the food, entertainment and activities are shaped around the theme. Another simple option is a games night, with an organised evening of traditional pub games, board games magnified into room-sized contests with teams of several people, or – increasingly popular – versions of TV gameshows.

You can move on to wine-tasting evenings, which run the risk of turning into that more traditional team-building exercise, a boozy night down the pub. Casino nights and virtual horse racing are other possibilities at the more relaxed end of the scale.

Competitive team-working skills are more evident in stockbroking games, in which groups are allocated fictitious money with which to trade shares in a virtual market, complete with profit warnings, unexpected announcements and boardroom coups they need to keep an eye on.

Then there are murder mystery nights, with teams competing to solve the crime. There are also circus skills workshops, drumming workshops and clowning workshops. Some companies offer teams the chance to produce a short film, while others bring in actors to facilitate role-playing exercises to develop empathetic skills.

In an 18th-century mansion outside Bristol, Amazing Events has recently added a new activity typical of the kind of event now being offered to managers. Called Masterpiece, it involves the team being broken into groups that each produce one section of a well-known painting using a different medium – watercolours for one group, crayons for another, collage for a third, and so on – with the results being pulled together at the end.

Director Robbie Burns said the activity is proving so popular that some companies are hanging the finished product on their office walls. He also said some of the growth in the popularity of indoor events was due to a decline among outdoor ones. "We've seen a great decline in inquiries for paintballing, and also for things like quad bikes and tanks. Of course, that may have to do with health and safety, and insurance.

"There are lots of different ways to approach these events, depending on what the customer wants. For some, if they're having a long meeting in the morning – death by Powerpoint – they just want their staff to have fun.

"Others have specific needs, and want to find out who are the achievers, who are the detail people, the planners, and so on. Many of these activities are designed to let those characteristics emerge." One such activity is offered by Gable Events near Peterborough. It involves using nothing but sheets of A4 paper to lift an egg as high off the ground as possible.

"That can really bring out people's ingenuity," said Merklyn Hauck , Gable's director. "One group joined a hundred pieces of paper into one enormous sheet, then rolled it into a cone and put the egg on top."

Sounds like fun, but does it work? That, said Mr Hauck, is largely down to the managers. The emphasis, he believes, should always be on fun, but it's up to management to make sure the lessons are learned. "A lot of these activities are basically fun with a team-building label, but they're very good if there's a reason for doing them and a debriefing and exploration afterwards of how people performed and what's been achieved.

"Without that follow-up, it just gets lost on people." And there's no point getting crayon on your clothes for that.